Book, Pig Blood next!Seraphim Pictures is enjoying a productive year overseeing the labors of bringing Clive Barker and Lakeshore Entertainment’s Midnight Meat Train to the big screen after a long journey on the development tracks. Executive producers Joe Daley and Anthony DiBlasi, both from Seraphim, say “Train” – directed by Ryuhei Kitamura and to be distributed through Lionsgate – is the first in a line of new “Books of Blood”-related stories to leave the station and head into theaters. “We have five or six of the shorts adapted into screenplays in some form,” Daley tells a Shock correspondent. He hints that Seraphim is being aligned with “a company that would be making two pictures a year for four years. We feel pretty confident it will happen as we envisioned it, knock on wood.”

The next two Barker-penned stories on the production platter? The Book of Blood and Pig Blood Blues, the latter a project being written and directed by DiBlasi. “We’re doing that one through Phoenix,” DiBlasi adds. “We’ll be casting soon. Being a foreign sales and independent picture we’re not setting up domestic distribution for it yet but we’re gearing up for another five months, could be sooner.”

Set in a juvenile detention center, ‘Blues’ unravels a supernatural mystery involving, well, a possessed pig. But it’s a helluva lot more detailed and disturbing than that. “To me, ‘Blues’ is a twisted take on a classic ghost story,” DiBlasi proudly admits of the Barker tale he’s devoting all of his creative energy to. “I love stories about outsiders and those kids at this juvenile detention center were certainly outsiders. It has this amazing ‘Lord of the Flies’ element with all these boys trapped together and this evil entity is stuck in there with them. Where the short story just touches on the supernatural element, I focused a lot on making it a ghost story. But keeping the pig, of course.”